WAUSAU - Transgender students in the Wausau School District can use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice and play on intramural sports teams of the gender with which they identify.

The Wausau School Board this week tweaked district rules pertaining to transgender students, keeping a provision that requires staff members to talk with a student about his or her transgender status before discussing the issue with parents.

The rules don't expressly require or exclude communication with parents.

"The board felt it was better for now to leave that open," said board President Lance Trollop.

Some transgender students might not be open with their parents and fear for their safety if they came out at home, according to the rules. The rules state that students' needs will be considered by school staff on a case-by-case basis.

School Board members voted on minor changes to the guidelines and the district will start using the rules immediately without any further votes or discussion, Trollop said.

About 25 community members spoke for a total of two hours at a special School Board meeting Monday night, Trollop said. Over the past few weeks the issue has drawn people who want the district to accommodate transgender students' preferences, and others who want the district to keep students in the bathrooms and locker rooms of their sex at birth.

Trollop described the crowd at Monday's meeting as respectful.

The district's rules define a transgender person as "an individual that consistently asserts a gender identity or gender expression at school or work that is different from the gender assigned at birth." School Board members kept that definition, because it specifies a student be "consistent" in expressing his or her chosen gender.

It's not clear how many transgender students attend Wausau schools. Not all transgender students would likely come forward, and it's not a statistic the administration would track and report to the board anyway, Trollop said.

Lance Trollop(Photo: Courtesy of the Wausau School District)

"We know we have transgender students in our district, but we don't know how many," Trollop said. Friends and parents of transgender students spoke at the Monday meeting.

A June report from the Williams Institute, a think tank at the University of California Los Angeles, determined that on average one adult in every 165 is transgender in the U.S.

School Board members changed the rules to acknowledge that the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association has its own policy on transgender students and the WIAA will review and regulate those cases for student athletes competing on districts' official teams.

Wausau district rules now state: As outlined in the WIAA transgender participation policy, transgender students who wish to play on a team corresponding to their gender identity must notify school officials — with their parents and in writing — that the student is transgender and would like to participate in a WIAA sport.

Transgender students in Wausau can participate in extracurricular activities and intramural sports as their chosen gender.

Wausau school officials considered treating locker room access different from bathroom access, because there tends to be more privacy in bathrooms. But board members elected to keep that access the same, Trollop said.

Several lawsuits between transgender students and school districts are underway across the country, and the Wausau district will keep an eye on those. All of the district's policies are fluid, Trollop said.

"I'm sure that it's something we'll continue to study." he said. "We understand that it's not something that is completely finalized."